What do planning leads cost in 2026?
No two vendors in this market price the same way. This is every published price we could find, converted into one number a builder can compare — including the price of doing it yourself, which is lower than ours.
A planning lead is three costs pretending to be one
Whatever you pay, you are buying three separate things, and the reason no two vendors' prices look alike is that they bundle them differently.
- The data. Somebody reads several hundred council planning registers every week and turns them into a list. Every council publishes its own for nothing, so what you are paying for is not the information — it is not having to visit 388 websites.
- The applicant's name and address. This is the expensive part and it is the part most list vendors do not have. A weekly list gives you a site address and a description; writing to whoever applied means the applicant's own contact details, which sit on the detail page of each application, one page at a time.
- The print and the post. A folded A4 letter, printed, enveloped, stamped second class and handed to Royal Mail.
We can tell you exactly what the third one costs, because we buy it wholesale and the invoice is not a secret: £0.74 a letter, measured against our own account with our print supplier. Measured A member of the public opening an account with the same supplier pays £0.88. Declared — the supplier's published list price
Every number below the print cost is data and software. Every number above it is somebody's margin, including ours.
What the whole market charges
18 ways to buy, normalised to one question: what does it cost to put this many letters in the post this month? Prices exclude VAT. Where a vendor sells tiers, the table takes whichever of their tiers is cheapest at that volume — which is what a competent buyer would do.
| Letters posted this month | 25 | 50 | 100 | 150 | 250 | 433 | 650 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Just Granted — the plan Measured | £39 £1.56 each | £63 £1.26 each | £123 £1.23 each | £183 £1.22 each | £303 £1.21 each | £522.60 £1.21 each | £783 £1.20 each |
| Just Granted — Free, pay per letter Measured | £36.25 £1.45 each | £72.50 £1.45 each | £145 £1.45 each | £217.50 £1.45 each | £362.50 £1.45 each | £627.85 £1.45 each | £942.50 £1.45 each |
| PlanPost Declared — read 22 Aug 2026 | £39 £1.56 each | £76.25 £1.52 each | £134.60 £1.35 each | £187.70 £1.25 each | £316.70 £1.27 each | £552.77 £1.28 each | £832.70 £1.28 each |
| BuildAlert Declared — read 22 Aug 2026 | £50 £2.00 each | £100 £2.00 each | £200 £2.00 each | £300 £2.00 each | £500 £2.00 each | £866 £2.00 each | £1,300 £2.00 each |
| TradeMailer Declared — read 22 Aug 2026 | £120 £4.80 each | £285 £5.70 each | £285 £2.85 each | £410 £2.73 each | £550 £2.20 each | £952.60 £2.20 each | £1,430 £2.20 each |
| Buildscout Local Standard +VAT Declared — read 22 Aug 2026 | £274 £10.96 each | £299 £5.98 each | £349 £3.49 each | £399 £2.66 each | £499 £2.00 each | £682 £1.58 each | £899 £1.38 each |
| Buildscout National +VAT Declared — read 22 Aug 2026 | £519 £20.76 each | £539 £10.78 each | £579 £5.79 each | £619 £4.13 each | £699 £2.80 each | £845.40 £1.95 each | £1,019 £1.57 each |
| Serac Tech Business, plus your own Stannp account our arithmetic, two published prices Declared — read 22 Aug 2026 | £261 £10.44 each | £283 £5.66 each | £327 £3.27 each | £371 £2.47 each | £459 £1.84 each | £620.04 £1.43 each | £811 £1.25 each |
| 2BuildUK managed mailing Declared — read 19 Aug 2026 | £95 £3.80 each | £95 £1.90 each | £190 £1.90 each | £285 £1.90 each | £475 £1.90 each | £822.70 £1.90 each | £1,235 £1.90 each |
| 2BuildUK data, one council, plus your own Stannp our arithmetic, two published prices Declared — read 19 Aug 2026 | £32 £1.28 each | £54 £1.08 each | £98 £0.98 each | £142 £0.95 each | £230 £0.92 each | £391.04 £0.90 each | £582 £0.90 each |
| SiteLens Pro plus your own Stannp our arithmetic, two published prices Declared — read 19 Aug 2026 | £61 £2.44 each | £83 £1.66 each | £127 £1.27 each | £171 £1.14 each | £259 £1.04 each | £420.04 £0.97 each | £611 £0.94 each |
| UK Planning Leads plus your own Stannp our arithmetic, two published prices Declared — read 19 Aug 2026 | £71 £2.84 each | £93 £1.86 each | £137 £1.37 each | £181 £1.21 each | £269 £1.08 each | £430.04 £0.99 each | £621 £0.96 each |
| The floor: free council lists plus your own Stannp our arithmetic, two published prices Declared — read 19 Aug 2026 | £22 £0.88 each | £44 £0.88 each | £88 £0.88 each | £132 £0.88 each | £220 £0.88 each | £381.04 £0.88 each | £572 £0.88 each |
| Planning Pipe Declared — read 19 Aug 2026 | not published | not published | not published | not published | not published | not published | not published |
| PlanLead Declared — read 19 Aug 2026 | not published | not published | not published | not published | not published | not published | not published |
| Nest Data Declared — read 19 Aug 2026 | not published | not published | not published | not published | not published | not published | not published |
| BuildSpotter Declared — read 19 Aug 2026 | not published | not published | not published | not published | not published | not published | not published |
| Active Planning Leads Declared — read 19 Aug 2026 | not published | not published | not published | not published | not published | not published | not published |
Notes on every row
- Just Granted — the plan
- Our own price, resolved from the same code that bills.
- Just Granted — Free, pay per letter
- No subscription and no minimum. Applicant names and addresses stay hidden until you pay for the plan.
- PlanPost
- Three tiers; this table takes whichever is cheapest at each volume, which is what a competent buyer would do. 389 councils, no contract, prices exclude VAT.
- BuildAlert
- Six published subscription tiers, from £50 a month for 25 letters to £500 for 250, plus a pay-as-you-go option — and every one of them prices a letter at exactly £2.00, so the ladder is a straight line and the tier you pick changes nothing. Postcards are £2.50. Re-read on their own pricing page on 22 August 2026: this row used to be the least certain one here, carried from an earlier reading because their page returned empty twice on 19 August. It is not carried any more.
- TradeMailer
- Five published packages — £120 for 40 letters, £285 for 100, £410 for 150, £525 for 200, £745 for 300 — plus a published nationwide rate of £2.20 a letter on orders over 200. Credits roll over and there is no minimum term. This row carried no figure at all until 22 August 2026: the middle packages were not readable on 19 August, and pricing the row off its two ends would have made TradeMailer look several times dearer than they are at fifty letters. They are readable now. Above 200 letters their own page offers two routes at once and this table takes the cheaper, which at 250 letters is the £2.20 rate rather than the 300-letter package.
- Buildscout Local Standard
- Monthly billing is FMB and FCA members only; everybody else pays £2,998 to £5,988 a year up front. Excludes VAT. Their local ladder runs Standard £2,998, Growth £3,588 and Pro £4,118 a year; this row is the cheapest of the three, at £1 a letter. There is also a separate FMB member offer at £199 a month for one 10-mile campaign with letters at £1, which is cheaper than anything on the pricing page and is not open to a builder who is not an FMB member.
- Buildscout National
- Same FMB/FCA monthly gate: £5,988 a year up front, or £499 a month if you are a member. Regional sits below it at £4,788 a year with letters at 85p. The cheapest letters we found anywhere sitting on the dearest subscription — the exact inverse of PlanPost.
- Serac Tech Business, plus your own Stannp account
- Serac publish an access fee and no print price at all — print-and-send is an unpriced Enterprise add-on. This row is their published floor plus Stannp's public letter rate. That addition is ours, not a price Serac quote.
- 2BuildUK managed mailing
- A standing offer of 50 projects mailed for £95 a month including print, postage and copywriting — £1.90 a letter all in. Nothing smaller is published, so the 25 column is their 50-letter price.
- 2BuildUK data, one council, plus your own Stannp
- From £10 a month per local planning authority for all of its applications. That is one council; a builder who works across five pays five times.
- The floor: free council lists plus your own Stannp
- Every council publishes a weekly list for nothing. This row is what the job costs if you do all of it yourself and value your own time at zero. Nothing in this market is cheaper, and no price we could charge would beat it.
- Planning Pipe
- Regional “from £44.95”, national “from £89.95” — a floor rather than a price. Their 60p managed-mailing rate, recorded on 4 August 2026, was gone from their site by the 19th and could not be re-found.
- PlanLead
- Publishes no prices at all — a free three-day trial, no card required.
- Nest Data
- No published pricing.
- BuildSpotter
- No published pricing.
- Active Planning Leads
- No published pricing.
The claim we will make, and the one we will not
At every volume in that table, a Just Granted row is the cheapest way to have letters posted for you. At 100 letters a month that is £123, against £134.60 from PlanPost, the cheapest managed alternative at that volume. Measured — our price; Declared — theirs
We are not the cheapest way to post letters, and no price we could charge would make us so. A builder who buys a council list for nothing and runs it through his own print account pays £0.88 a letter with no markup at all. At 100 letters a month that is £88 against our £123 — we are 40% above the floor, and across the whole table the gap runs from 37% to 77%. Measured
That gap is the price of the work: applicant names and addresses pulled from each application's own detail page, postcodes checked and geocoded, duplicates and opt-outs suppressed, an exact preview of the printed letter, and nobody merging a spreadsheet on a Monday morning. Whether that is worth 40% is a judgement, not a fact, and it is yours to make. What we are not going to do is pretend the floor is not there.
What nobody publishes
5 vendors in this market publish no price we could normalise. That is not an accusation — a bespoke quote is a legitimate way to sell — but it is the standing hole in any comparison of this market, including this one.
- Planning Pipe — Regional “from £44.95”, national “from £89.95” — a floor rather than a price. Their 60p managed-mailing rate, recorded on 4 August 2026, was gone from their site by the 19th and could not be re-found.
- PlanLead — Publishes no prices at all — a free three-day trial, no card required.
- Nest Data — No published pricing.
- BuildSpotter — No published pricing.
- Active Planning Leads — No published pricing.
How to check any of this
Every competitor figure above is Declared: it was read off that vendor's own published page on the date beside it, and it is true of their page on that day rather than for ever. Prices move. If you are about to buy, open their page and check — the links are in the table. If you find one of ours out of date, we would rather know.
One row is weaker than the rest and is marked as such: BuildAlert's pricing page returned nothing when we last tried to read it, so that row is carried from an earlier reading. We have left it in with the warning attached rather than dropping a competitor from a comparison because their site was down.
Where the numbers come from
Who publishes this
Just Granted reads the planning register of every council we cover, every week, and posts letters to the applicants for you. A free account searches all of it and posts a letter for £1.45 with no subscription. £39 a month adds the applicants' names and addresses, with 30 letters included and £1.20 each after that.